South Atlantic Climatology

Introduction

One of the goals of the WOCE AIMS Deep Basin Experiment is an
investigation of the large-scale circulation in the deep Brazil Basin
in the South Atlantic. When plotting isopycnal tracer fields it was
soon realized that data sets from different cruises had to be
bias-corrected in order to remove obvious artifacts. The O2 corrections
calculated by Gouretski and Jancke, (Progr. Oceanogr., 2001) proved
unsatisfactory in that their data set lacks an important section in our
region of interest (the 1983 Oceanus section at 24S). Furthermore it
appears that there are still consistent biases in the O2 data corrected
using their data; this may be because of typos in the paper, however. It
was therefore decided to do our own bias correction.

below the nominal depth of 1500m (at n27.89), the property
surfaces are constructed separately in the Brazil, Argentine, Angola,
and Cape Basins; this leads to some contouring artifacts at the
boundaries because contouring is done across the entire domain

extrapolated data are not to be trusted; this is mainly a problem in
the Argentine Basin (SW corner) near 2500m where the properties are
extrapolated from profiles lying south of our region of interest

n levels taken from a 50dbar average Brazil-Basin profile at
19S subsampled every 250m and rounded to 0.01

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. 0220407. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Science Foundation.